Grids meet Renewables

Two organisations put their names to this Brussels event on 20 February 2018: the Renewables Grid Initiative and WindEurope, which speaks for the wind industry. They ran it as a conference paired with a best-practice fair.

The invitation set out the problem plainly. The energy transition would touch citizens, consumers, industry and the environment, and meeting society’s expectations as well as its technical and environmental requirements meant getting generators, grid companies and others into the same room to decide how to proceed. The stated purpose of “Grids meet Renewables” was an open dialogue between the renewables and grid sectors.

BEST PATHS listed the event in its own calendar, between a Brussels presentation on 27 February of a joint report on flexibility for electricity and gas distribution operators and the Demo 4 workshop in Budapest on 5 April. The project did not organise the day, and its calendar entry records no presentation of its own there.

The entry is still a fair marker of where the project stood in early 2018: its five demonstrations were in their final year, and the answers they tested (new cables, converters and repowered lines) were the grid side of that same conversation.

The same tension between generation and transmission is visible today in the directory of European power links, which tracks more than 60 HVDC and AC connections with their capacity, route and status, and in the guide to grid congestion.